Linux Format magazine has unveiled its annual Reader Awards (PDF) for 2008 and KDE won a 'landslide' victory in the category of Free Software Project of the year in recognition of the 'incredible' work done with KDE 4. Amarok, Qt, Konqueror and the KDE-based Asus Eee PC were also recognised in the awards. Read on for more details of the KDE related successes.

As noted in the Linux Format article, it takes a 'lot of hard work, some serious code fu and above all a commitment to the free software ideals' to succeed in the Reader Awards. The winners are chosen in an open process in which readers both determine the shortlist through nominations and the ultimate winners. KDE can be proud to be named the best Free Software Project - a wide category encompassing any project producing free software, including the likes of Compiz (runners up in this category) and giants of free software such as the Mozilla Foundation and Apache projects.

The hard work and successes of the Amarok and Konqueror teams were also recognised as they each came second in their respective software categories - notably Amarok was named the second placed desktop application overall, beaten only by Firefox. The Asus Eee PC which uses a custom Xandros desktop with KDE technologies won the accolade for best geek gadget of the year, beating the iPhone into second place. Trolltech (now Qt Software) was awarded second place in the embedded Linux category for Qt, rounding off a strong showing in this year's awards for KDE and related projects.

I have it on my play-laptop, and there are e.g. only 3 bugs in e.g. Akregator that make it feel very unfinished:

a) CTRL-W does nothing when hit the first time. The second time it tells me to check the double keybinding of CRTL-W. After checking everything, I know it's not like that. Bug exists.
b) CTRL++ does not work. Bug exists.
c) Settings for sort order and displayed items is not saved. By default it sorts by title, not by date?! Bug exists.

And that is only _one_ application with only the 3 features of it that are somewhat essential to using the software.

Me, I am waiting for 4.3. I know, Richard rightfully said once something similar to "It's going to be ready sooner if you help". But probably I am allowed to point out, that 4.2 is still only a waypoint.

I think the comment was on the same level of discussion as "yay kde4.2 is the best kde, i haven't encountered any bugs yet".

We really appreciate the hard work done so far and would die for our beloved devs and give their all our fortune if need be, but by all means it does not mean that kde4 is perfect now. If your daily usage pattern requires those 3 features, they really start to bug after a while.

Ah, I noticed this when writing the article but then forgot (since I had paper copy too), just checked and it's an issue in both okular and evince on Fedora with okular 0.7.90 on KDE 4.1.96 (4.2 RC1) from kde-redhat and poppler 0.8.7 - as both evince and okular are affected I'm thinking poppler may be the issue

To be fair, I don't think the PDF is really meant for public consumption - Aaron obtained the link to the PDF so that he could link to it from his blog post on this a few days ago. LXF probably intend that people mostly only see the printed copy (since they sell that) so depending on what they use internally this may not be an issue for them.

Also, there are reports (I've seen a couple now but haven't been able to check myself) that it works in older versions of poppler-based viewers so it may be a problem with a newer version of poppler rather than the PDF being bad itself.